Traveling Companions

I know I’m LONG over due on the 7 Principles. I had to post this thought, though.

I am a member of a “Dating Site”. I use it to meet people and because it is the one with the neat quizzes and questions. They have also started posting articles about things they’ve learned by analyzing the data they collect.

They posted recently about the tendency of guys to get into a negative cycle of sending out introduction messages and then, on not getting any replies, widening their search, putting less into the message and sending out more. This leads the women to feel overwhelmed and to be even pickier about who they reply to, having so many messages to wade through. This means that the rate of replies goes down, leading the men to more frustration. So, they send a larger quantity of lower quality messages to women they have even less in common with.

I read almost the same article about job seekers and employers. The exact same cycle. Desperate job seekers trying to find any paying position, leading them to apply for things they aren’t really qualified for and to send out tons of very generic sounding cover letters. This drowns out the people who are trying to break in to the field, either as a change of life or from the into level, leading to more frustration, as these people aren’t even considered, tossed t with all the other “unqualified” applicants.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I found the parallel to interesting to pass up, and I needed something interesting to post.

This is going to be a series of posts, addressing the almost polar and certainly polarizing views of the far right and the far left in the USA.

I am the worlds worst libertarian. And I suck as a socialist. I am both of these things because I believe in the US Constitution. Not a part here or there, and not in arguing over the meaning of a certain, ambiguous line in an amendment. I believe in the spirit of the thing, even where the wording leaves something to be desired.

I think that the framers knew that “in Order to form a more perfect Union” we really did need to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”

And I don’t think any of those are optional. In the next few days, I’ll be taking a closer look at what I believe each of these ideals means to our nation today, and through us, the world.

We can do better in the realm of Justice; we ought to be rehabilitating rather than focusing on punishment. Domestic Tranquility is confused between concepts of security and cultural uniformity. “The Common Defense” has been perverted to a war of and on ideas rather than an effort to insure peace. “General Welfare” will likely constitute an entire post, and is, as I see it, the general focus of my whole blog. We need to do better in each of these realms to claim, much less secure, Liberty for our citizens. As is, we don’t not have “rights”, as those would be things we believe and affirm for every person in our jurisdiction and promote for all people everywhere. What we have are privileges that can only be revoked under a weakening standard of Due Process.

We owe it to our founders, our veterans, our patriots and civil rights leaders and all those who’ve worked to better our standards of living and care for each other to do better. We’ve had the bar set pretty high, and we still strive to reach it after 222 years. We can’t stop now.

Humans have some innate need to congregate. We long for community and family. We seek to have our ideas heard, understood and spread.

All animals have some sense of self preservation. Some, like ant and bee workers, even value certain members of the species more than their own lives. We are similar, in that we can value the lives of others over own own, but for us it is when we recognize that their value to our community group is great enough to warrant self-sacrifice. The safety of the next generation or of the group frequently trumps that of the self.

We don’t need to protect the queen or the hive to insure the survival of our genes; we are not drones who are sterile physically and mentally. In fact, even without reproduction, we can each nurture the next generation and contribute to the whole of human knowledge and experience. We value the propagation thoughts and principles over our genetic legacy. That’s a defining trait in human development; the group, the idea, or the dream can be bigger than the self. That seems unique in the world that we live in.

I think this is also the root of so many problems. We have some need to find ideas and cling to them. We define ourselves by them, sometimes with out having a firm grasp of what the basis or the history of the idea is. We need to label things, including ourselves and other people; and then we start thinking in terms of “us” and “them”.

I find it sad that this amazing ability to weigh the intellectual legacy against the genetic is at once one of the great advances in evolution yet also such a handicap to the race that seems closest to its mastery.